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French Bishops Sound Alarm Over Rising Islamophobia
[An Nahar] Leading bishops have voiced alarm at a rise in anti-Islamic sentiment in La Belle France and admitted that hardening attitudes within the Roman Catholic church are fueling the trend.Any concern from the leading bishops about hardening attitudes within Islam? In comments that will add to pressure on President Francois Hollande ...the Socialist president of La Belle France, and a fine job he's doing of it... to respond to demands from La Belle France's large Moslem community to speak out on the issue, the Bishop of Angouleme, Claude Dagens, said he was profoundly concerned by recent developments. "It is with much pain that I notice the emergence of a Catholic Islamophobia ...the irrational fear that Moslems will act the way they usually do... , in the same way that there has been a Catholic anti-semitism for centuries," Dagens told Agence La Belle France Presse in an interview on the sidelines of an assembly of French bishops here. Dagens said his concerns had been heightened by the controversial "Moslem demographics" presentation made at the Vatican last month in which Cardinal Peter Turkson predicted that Islam would eventually become the dominant religion in Europe. The Vatican subsequently distanced itself from a film which included a claim that La Belle France could have a majority of Moslems within four decades, but Dagens acknowledged that the episode reflected a worrying shift in attitudes. "We are living in a society where fear is seeping into every corner. That's true for Moslems but also for Catholics." Dagens comments, echoed by a number of his colleagues here, came in the wake of a call by La Belle France's Moslem Council, the main representative body for the country's estimated five million Moslems, for the President to publicly condemn Islamophobia. Behind the call lies resentment based on a perception that Hollande and his ministers have given greater priority to combating a recent rise in anti-semitism than they have to defending the Moslem community in the face of a parallel trend. Earlier this month, Hollande vowed that La Belle France would wage a relentless fight to eradicate anti-semitism from society, describing it as a "national cause." Abdellah Zekri, one of the leaders of the Moslem Council, called for La Belle France's Islamic community to be offered similar support. "Given the rise in the number of Islamophobic acts and anti-Moslem racism, we want a formal declaration from the President of the Republic that includes the Moslems of La Belle France in this national cause," Zekri said. Posted by: Fred 2012-11-11 |
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